Joan Baez & Loudon Wainwright III folk up Door County

Joan Baez, at age 70, was gracious & luminous in a Door County Auditorium concert July 16th. Her rendition of Woody Guthries's "Deportees," which she dedicated to the immigrants of Arizona, especially moved me. I enjoyed hearing her perform, with a fine 4-piece band, Robbie Robertson's brilliant "The Night They Drove Old Dixie Down" for an encore. Then she made an "I'm Sleepy" sign as if to apologize for a short show (it actually lasted over two hours).

Why did Ms. Baez only have one big hit in the Sixties anyway? Some of the audience applauded the opening notes of "There But for Fortune," a Phil Ochs song that she made famous circa 1966, among other favorites. "Diamonds & Rust" got some FM-radio airplay in the late Seventies, as I recall. She didn't play that one here.

Loudon Wainwright III, dressed in short pants - due, he said, to American Airlines having lost his luggage & CDs in Chicago - was professionally entertaining at Egg Harbor on July 18th. The outdoor crowd & I sang along to his early 70s novelty hit "Dead Skunk (in the Middle of the Road)." Head tilted back, tongue lolling & mouth distorted for comic effect, he played 40 years of his weird music, including a tender song ("Five Years Old") for his now famous daughter Martha Wainwright.

But then Loudon disappointed us by backing out of the traditional Peg Egan PAC post-concert reception. Oh well, I couldn't have bought his 2009 Grammy-winning CD "High, Wide & Handsome: The Charlie Poole Project" from him anyway. Still, I would've liked to get an autograph from that sometime actor. Son Rufus Wainwright may be an even better songwriter and performer than his father.

It Came from Memphis

I've discovered a fantastic book about the weird rock music scene in Memphis in the 1960s & 70s. It's called "It Came from Memphis" (1995) by Robert Gordon, a Memphian. It has an introduction by Peter Guralnick and features lengthy interview excerpts with the late great Memphis singer/guitarist & songwriter Alex Chilton (The Box Tops, Big Star).

Dig this grisly little taste, from Gordon's description of a bizarre mid-1970s cinema verite-style documentary called "Stranded in Canton," mostly shot in Memphis. It describes a scene in which a pair of circus geeks square off in a chickenhead-biting contest on the streets of New Orleans:

"The disappointing part of seeing a human being bite the head off a live chicken is the ease with which the chicken's neck disengages from its body. Geeks don't so much 'bite' the head off as, with the chicken's head in their mouth, they pull the head and neck loose, kind of like sucking your thumb but yanking it all the way off."

Now that's what I call journalism you can use. God, I miss the weirdness of the South sometimes.

The Weird, the Bad & the Unbearable

Surviving a World of Crazies
(a satirical essay)

“When the going gets weird, the weird turn pro.”
- Dr. Hunter S. Thompson

People like to categorize things. Being a person, I’m no different. For example, I divide other people into 3 types. I do this for my amusement as well as for my safety. Although they might seem like vague catchall categories, the utility of such a classification of our fellow humans is indisputable. Mine may not be a scientifically precise schema, but it works. Keep in mind that there are borderline cases, people who are difficult to classify precisely. People can be ambiguous and deceptive buggers.

1. The WEIRD.
The first anthropological type that I’ve identified is the weird. These are your garden-variety, everyday, more or less regular folks. It includes neurotics, eccentrics and harmless weirdos as well as more conventional men and women who hide their weirdness - which is an innate characteristic of humanity. Generally, they make good friends and sometimes even decent lovers. You might even be one yourself. In fact, odds are you are weird: government-funded studies indicate that approximately three out of four people are merely weird and, therefore, not normally dangerous. Basket cases and tattoo addicts may be weird; then again, they may be unbearable (see category 3 below).

2. The BAD.
These are the truly awful people, mean-spirited geniuses or morons without a conscience. Do not be conned by them. Such humanoids are not bad in the the ironic slang sense of “bad” (meaning good). They are evil and must be exterminated. Or at least shunned. They operate with a constant death wish, either their own or perhaps yours, should you cross a bad guy’s path at the wrong time. The term encompasses everyone from perverted psychopaths like Milwaukee’s own Jeffrey Dahmer, sadistic dictators like Idi Amin and most armed compound dwellers. Throw in some neo-Nazis, a few Islamic jihadis and the pedophile next door and suddenly you’ve got a dangerous cocktail party of bad actors. Fortunately, such unregenerate assholes are relatively rare. But they make up for their low numbers by posing a threat to society’s very existence. They are the nuclear bombs in our midst. Defuse them if you dare!

3. The UNBEARABLE.
This is the sort of person who grates on the chalkboard of your nerves simply by being proximate. To illustrate this sizable sector of the population, imagine the boy or girl, man or woman who most frequently gets your goat. Who needles you with predictable frequency. Who pesters you persistently. Who provokes you, who mocks your defects mercilessly. They may be a busybody blood relative, a schoolyard bully or that obnoxious co-worker who plays loud gangster video games in the next cubicle. You are probably forced to spend considerable time in the company of these jerks, due to family or work obligations. Worse still, you have to pretend to their face not to detest their every annoying habit, quirk and tick. If you didn’t have a family or employment relationship, their unbearability could be easily curtailed or avoided. For me, it’s my father, who inflicted his name on me when I was a defenseless baby. Dad and I despise one another as only immediate family members can. Dysfunctional families are often fun on TV, but they rarely are in reality.

So, you may wonder, how does it benefit me to know which subspecies of homo sapiens I am dealing with in any given situation? Well, for your convenience I’ve reduced the answer to this acronym: WE BASh UnDEAD, which stands for
* Weirdo? Embrace ‘em.
* Bad? Annihilate or Shun ‘em.
* Unbearable? Don’t Even Answer the Door.
That little mnemonic device could save you hundreds of hours of grief or even prevent your imminent murder. The next time you sense discomfort in the presence of another, ask yourself (silently, of course): Is he weird, bad or merely unbearable? It could be a matter of life and death. Especially in the USA, which leads the world in the rate of bad and unbearable citizens. No wonder America’s prisons and jails are so full!

DISCLAIMER: The weird are sometimes suicidal, the truly bad are frequently homicidal and the unbearable will gradually smother your spirit with their tedium. Choose your companions and associates wisely, friend. Life’s too short to spend much of it among the non-weird. My advice? Find your own kind and enjoy peace of mind.

Tribute bands: cultural parasites or well-meaning imposters?

Having just enjoyed a fine Simon and Garfunkel musical impersonation (called a "tribute" act in the biz) in Egg Harbor, I was puzzling over this question: Do such imitators constitute a parasitical scourge on culture or a deserved homage to great musical artists? It's a busy world of perpetual entertainment, so I'll brief.

Some, like tacky Beatles tribute band Rubber Soul, which I saw recently at a casino in Madison (Wis.), commit crimes against culture. I could devise no more fitting punishment for the likes of those insect-feeding clowns than the one they've already condemned themselves to: earning their bread by competing with the deafening din of slot machines being pulled by a thousand obese grannies. The Native Americans' revenge on the British Invasion perhaps.

Others, like Messrs. Swearingen and Beedle, keep fond musical memories alive. Nostalgia, after all, sells better among Baby Boomers than sex nowadays. Besides, since the real Simon and Garfunkel are on medical hiatus (instead of touring as planned this summer), what could A.J. and Jonathan possibly do that might hurt the eardrums of a harmless crowd of old folkies hungry for a memory-taste of the Sixties?

I only hope the Roy Orbison tribute act, booked to play the Door County Fair in Sturgeon Bay on August 4th, won't disappoint those who know and love that weird genius's music. If you go, you'll have to let me know. I'll be at the New Pornographers show at the Orpheum Theater in Madison that evening - ain't nothing uncreative or especially derivative about Neko Case and her Canadian gang!

Meeting my deer totem

I was rounding the corner of Norway & Willow
near the village of Ephraim (Wisconsin) on my
Trek bike one hot afternoon when I nearly ran
into a doe, a deer - a female DEER -
standing in the middle of the street.

I stopped, hoping she wouldn't charge me.
I finally won the inter-species staredown:
scuttling hooves as she turned, she hurdled a
wooden fence & ran into the forest.

A beautiful tawny female animal
in the bright sunlight of July asphalt
darted into the darkness of woods & disappeared.
Karin Wolf of Madison told me that deer
are totems of gentleness & I believe it.

Jack, Sam, Me & Death - an essay

"Poetry is the revelation of higher truths." -J.W. von Goethe

"There are no truths - only stories." -Zuni proverb

After my cousin Sam's funeral in Fond du Lac on October 5th, 2009, I walked into a bookstore and bought The Dharma Bums. It was my 49th birthday and I wanted to commemorate the dual occasion, Sam's death and my birth, by getting a novel that would honor his memory and inspire me. A fellow Jack Kerouac fan, Sam had barely made it to age 30 when his mental pain became so unbearable that he killed himself. I understood that kind of desperate grief, having survived an overdose of anti-depressants. But I was luckier, or less determined, than my cousin.

Sam had chosen a remote location for his final act. In fact, it took a few days for searchers to find his remains inside the parked car near the marsh. I decided to bid the world adieu from a busy stretch of Lake Michigan shoreline. After riding a bus into downtown Racine, I managed to walk as far as the public library on Lake Street when I collapsed, unconscious, and was rescued by some good Samaritan. The hospital was nearby and so the emergency-room staff had time to defibrillate my stopped heart and filter my poisoned blood before brain damage had set in. Sam chose carbon monoxide poisoning for his duel with Depression. He left a wife and small child behind. His mother, at least, was spared the terrible news. Judy - Sam's lovely Mom, my sweetheart of an aunt - had already staked her claim on the grave. She killed herself six years earlier, by CO poisoning.

When I entered the bookstore on Main Street that sunny autumn afternoon, I was pleased to discover a new Penguin edition of Kerouac's novel on the shelves. I asked for a pack of American Spirits cigarettes, charmed at having found a literature store that also sold tobacco. I justified the purchase by noting that Sam was a smoker too. Then I started the long drive north to Oconto County, where I was going to visit my friend Wolf. Ironically, Wolf's only brother, a pharmacist and Vietnam combat veteran, had killed himself too, swallowing a precisely fatal dose of barbiturates in the winter of 1979.

As I sped north on Highway 41 in my little black Volkswagen, I passed Winnebago, where the state had institutionalized me for the second half of 1984. The treatment consisted of: (1) psychotropic medication (not unlike the stuff that had nearly killed me); (2) group therapy; (3) occupational therapy (art /craft projects); and (4) exercise, especially via sports (basketball, softball, tennis) and hiking. I had survived ECT, so nothing psychiatric scared me anymore.

I also recall reading a book during my 5-month stay at Winnebago Mental Health Facility, by the Catholic priest-philosopher-scientist Fr. Teilhard de Chardin. It may have provided some mental stimulation, but it certainly failed to convince me of God's existence.

Somewhere north of Neenah, I cast my mind back even further, to the summer of 1983, when I discovered The Dharma Bums at the public library in Portland, Oregon. I was living hand to mouth at the time, auditing lectures on Chaplin and Nietzsche at Portland State University and briefly staying at a skidrow flophouse where I got pubic lice from the bedlinen. I had hitchhiked to the Rose City all the way from San Antonio, Texas, where my meager bus funds had taken me from New Orleans. I stayed with friendly drivers or at less glamorous places along the way. In exchange for my staying awake to an hour of gospel propaganda, for example, some hospitable Christians fed and bedded me at their rescue mission in Las Cruces, New Mexico.

I was emulating Kerouac's hobo-inspired mode of living before I had read his road novels, which helped set off the Sixties "rucksack revolution." Like Jack, I had acquaintances on the West Coast who'd put me up for a few days. But mine were in dull middle-class places - San Diego, Burbank - rather than Jack's beloved bohemian San Francisco. And yet, as much as Ronald Reagan tried to turn America's cultural clock back to the repressive Fifties, my road experience could sometimes be weirder than Kerouac's. Jack, as far as I know, was never escorted to a gay bar in the Castro district by a Christian Brother high-school teacher. That highway savior gave me a lift from near LA all the way to San Francisco Bay. Afterwards, I was glad that I had not chosen the life of a Catholic monk.

Nevertheless, as a natural loner and habitual observer (so was Kerouac), I've always felt monkish. That inclination cannot be undermined by society's disapproval or people's suspicions. In his Buddhist days, Jack aspired to be a bhikku, a Zen monk who lives out a creed of compassion. He sometimes wanted to become a bodhisattva too, an enlightened person who renounces nirvana in order to show others a way out of their suffering. Like his nineteenth-century American literary forebears Mark Twain (an agnostic Southerner) and Walt Whitman (an impoverished homosexual), Kerouac saw himself an outsider.

The son of strict working-class French-Canadian Catholic immigrants, Kerouac also had Iroquois blood and a dead brother, Gerard. He didn't even master the English language until he was in his late teens, attending Columbia University on a football scholarship. Despite that chance at entering the nation's elite, he dropped out of the rat race instead. He dared to became a writer, turning his sympathies toward fellow outsiders, rebels and misfits.

Preferring wild men to tame ones, Kerouac celebrated in his writing the antics of personalities as diverse as the delinquent speed-freak Neal Cassady (called Dean Moriarty in On the Road) and the scholarly Zen-poet Gary Snyder (Japhy Ryder in The Dharma Bums). Despite his embrace of adventure and exuberance, Jack's moods could turn world-weary in a heartbeat. Norbert Blei may be right in asserting that "there's a Kerouac inside every writer." Fortunately, not every would-be Kerouac drinks himself to a death by middle age.

There are many better - yet, admittedly, some far worse - ways to die. In a dark poem from Mexico City Blues (1959), recorded for posterity by Kerouac on Poetry for the Beat Generation, Jack seems fed up with this sad planet: "I wish I was free of that slaving meat wheel, safe in heaven dead," he says in a deadpan monotone.

By the late Fifties Kerouac had written his best stuff. Arguably, he had accomplished the mission laid out for himself in a moving passage, set in September 1955, that opens The Dharma Bums. Here Jack (as Ray) describes his encounter with a timid old hobo, with whom he shares his wine, bread and cheese in a railroad freight car travelling from Los Angeles to San Francisco:

I believed that I was an oldtime bhikku in modern clothes wandering the world . . . in order to turn the wheel of the True Meaning, or Dharma, and gain merit for myself as a future Buddha (Awakener) and as a future Hero of Paradise . . . The little bum in the gondola solidified all my beliefs by warming up to the wine and talking and finally whipping out a tiny slip of paper which contained a prayer by Saint Teresa announcing that after death she will return to the earth by showering it with roses from heaven, forever, for all living creatures. [Kerouac, The Dharma Bums, Viking Penguin, 2008 hardcover edition, p. 2.]

Kerouac then introduces the character who inspired the novel while suggesting what its title signifies:

The little Saint Teresa bum was the first genuine Dharma Bum I'd met, and the second was the number one Dharma Bum of them all and in fact it was he, Japhy Ryder, who coined the phrase. Japhy Ryder was a kid from eastern Oregon brought up in a log cabin deep in the woods . . . interested in animals and Indian lore so that when he got to college by hook or crook he was already well equipped for his early studies in anthropology and later in Indian myth . . . [He] became an Oriental scholar and discovered the greatest Dharma Bums of them all, the Zen Lunatics of China and Japan. [The Dharma Bums, p. 5.]

Whether unconsciously or by design, Kerouac summons the compelling power of myth by casting his literary alter egos, Sal Paradise and Ray Smith, and their buddy-protagonists in On the Road (Dean Moriarty) and The Dharma Bums (Japhy Ryder) as heroes enacting a sort of mythic quest across the epic landscapes of the West in nuclear-age America.

As Joseph Campbell notes in The Hero with a Thousand Faces (1949), mythological adventures are similar across all cultures, whether the hero is Prometheus, Gautama-Buddha, Moses, Jesus or Mohammed. Myths share this story-pattern: (1) the hero ventures forth from the common world into (2) a region of supernatural wonder, where (3) she wins a decisive victory, after which (4) she returns with the power to bestow boons on the community. Myths derive their power, Campbell says, from a kind of tough spiritual instruction, surpassing both moral didacticism and psychological drama:

Where the moralist would be filled with indignation and the tragic poet with pity and terror, mythology breaks the whole of life into a vast, horrendous Divine Comedy. Its Olympian laugh is not escapist in the least, but hard, with the hardness of life itself - which, we may take it, is the hardness of God, the Creator. Mythology, in this respect, makes the tragic attitude seem somewhat hysterical, and the merely moral judgement shortsighted. Yet the hardness is balanced by an assurance that all that we see is but the reflex of a power that endures, untouched by the pain. Thus the tales are both pitiless and terrorless - suffused with the joy of a transcendent anonymity regarding itself in all of the self-centered battling egos that are born and die in time. [Campbell, The Hero with a Thousand Faces, Princeton University Press, 1973 paperback edition, pp. 45-46.]

I suppose I was on my own kind of quest in the summer of 1983. Jack was an enthusiastic adventurer some 30 years earlier, but he grew tired of the road. Then fame really soured him on life. Travel, when done in a spirit of receptivity, is the perfect antidote to the soul-sucking tendencies of television and the Internet. Adventure-driven travel is active, spontaneous, liberating, reflective and real. Therefore, it can be dangerous. My travels throughout the 1980s and into the mid-90s were less mythic adventures than attempts at the old geographical cure. I was fleeing the feeling that I had become a hostage of depression. I was more fugitive than hero.

Sam drove to Nevada once, reportedly on just such a romantic geographical quest. In Sam I saw a kindred soul: a young man struggling to derive joy from a melancholy existence. He endured, putting up daily resistance to the seductive siren voices urging self-destruction. Death seems merciful when your own mind turns against you. Death, after all, is the ultimate egalitarian, a massive leveler. Death doesn't give a damn who you are. In the end, death embraces us all with the cold indifference of a Great Plains blizzard.

Jack Kerouac, at least, tasted the satisfaction that successful artists know. He left us a library of stories and poetry that continue to move and inspire millions. As far as I know, Sam left no suicide note. So I'll compose this epitaph on his behalf: Spend your allotted days as meaningfully, as intensely, as beautifully as you can. Bring back a boon of some kind. Share the fruits of whatever victory you manage to attain in this contentious world.

And, above all, dream harder.

Cory Chisel & some Fourth of July synchronicity

Well, it's nearly Independence Day & I just experienced a weird bit of pre-midnight synchronicity at the University of Wisconsin Memorial Union (UWMU). Here's the story, friends, as briefly as I can sketch it.

"The show ain't great till somebody gets naked," said Cory Chisel from behind Ray-Bans on the sun-blinded stage at Memorial Park in Appleton this afternoon, near the end of his fantastic hometown set with The Wandering Sons. Part gospel fervor, part hipster cool - a perfect blend in music & style.

As much as it pains me to say it, a performance by mediocre LA roots-rockers Dawes' here at the UWMU terrace tonight might have officially gotten great: I just saw a nude dude diving off the pier into Lake Mendota. In fairness, he seemed more inspired by booze than music.

I still maintain, as I said to the UW sound guy, that Dawes sucks compared to Cory's band. Anyway, the thing is, I saw Cory open for Dawes in February at the Mercy Lounge in Nashville - and he was far better than them.

Okay, nobody's ever erected a monument to a critic. But the truth deserves to be told. While getting Cory's autograph on his (re-released 2006) CD "The Little Bird" today, he said that he was still jetlagged after his return from the famous Glastonbury Festival in England.

For you trivia buffs, Cory Chisel shares a hometown with fellow Appletonians Houdini & Willem Dafoe. Cory certainly knows how to make magic with a guitar & microphone. You lucky people in the Fox Valley can see him at the Paperfest in Kimberly & at Cranky Pat's in Neenah later this month.

And God bless America - for producing such wonderful music!

How weird can Door County get?

After a personal walking tour (nobody else showed up) of historic downtown Fish Creek, led by retired schoolteacher & native local Barb, whose parents ran the Summertime ice-cream parlor/gift shop on Cedar Street for decades, I hurried north along the coast to Sister Bay in time to catch the Newtonburg Brass Band play in period attire at Waterfront Park yesterday. The musicians sat in formal 1910 dress as though the intervening century of progress in more comfortable styles & cooler fabrics had never happened.

Man, I thought, dig that lady pounding the drumkit, garbed in a big black sun hat & ankle-length dress like some proto-punk Lizzie Borden! I sat on the grass, surrounded by the geriatric set, stifling an urge to mock those bandgeeks from Manitowoc County who acted as though Sousa marches remained all the rage in 2010. A sad sunny spectacle indeed. Still, their music may have sounded better than the hip-hop & pop dreck no doubt pouring into the iPod-covered ears of those teenagers barely clad in bikinis on the beach a stone's throw away.

I stopped at the Piggly Wiggly to pick up a few food items & I ran into my former media-crush, Milwaukee TV sportscaster Jessie Garcia for the second time this week. I hightailed it home, ate & read some Norbert Blei essays. Later I got drunk while watching Fear & Loathing in Las Vegas on a DVD courtesy of the Menominee Tribal Library in Keshena (via inter-library loan, godsend to poor intellectuals stuck in the boondocks). The drug consumption habits of Dr. Gonzo & Raoul Duke made me feel like a piker, so I drove off to Husby's to hear The Mullet Hunters. The band was a no-show, though, due to a sick child, the baldheaded bartender told me. Note to self: never trust any group, rock or otherwise, with "mullet" in its name.

I sat & studied the crowd, sobering up by slowly sipping a Guinness stout for an hour and a half. The more energetic drinkers, mostly youths born before I managed to graduate from college (1986), regarded me with suspicion - as small-town folk regard all silent strangers. I was pleased, however, to have found a Northwoods tavern where women outnumbered men. My patience was rewarded in with a song by The Ramones: "I Wanna Be Sedated." And so, it seems, does sedate Door County, Wisconsin, USA.